LECTURE
Delivered December 13, 2016 No. 1279 | March 28, 2017

Pray for Chekhov: Or What Russian Literature Can Teach

Conservatives
Gary Saul Morson, PhD

Abstract: American conservatives can learn much from the great lit-
erary output of 19th century Russia. Though seemingly distant in time
and place, the great Russian novelists faced intellectual and moral
Key Points
circumstances remarkably similar to those we find today in America nn Today, we face a choice between
the dangerous theory-based
and in the West generally. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov all wrote
uniformity of the intelligentsia
in opposition to the powerful ruling class emerging in Russia and the and the wise perspective on life
West, the intelligentsia. The revolutionary doctrines of the intelligentsia espoused by Russian literature.
pointed toward authoritarianism, sought the destruction of individual-
nn The Russian novel is known,
ity and religion, and the imposition of pseudo-scientific doctrines onto above all, for psychology. What
human life. The weapon of choice for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov is less often appreciated is that
to combat this was literature—the best means both to appeal to man’s in showing the complexity of the
sentiments and reason and to demonstrate their opponents’ utopianism psyche, the novelists were mak-
and destructiveness. ing a polemical point. The intel-
ligentsia denied that people were
“The surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent complex at all. Human complex-
ity was an insight hindering radi-
of his hatred for the intelligentsia.”
cal action.
—Prominent Russian critic and philosopher Mikhail Gershenzon,
in the anthology Landmarks (1909) nn We Americans need to enrich
our thinking if we are to avoid
the Russian outcome of a cen-
The Argument tury ago.
I propose to recount a century-long argument that is especially
relevant today. As my epigraph suggests, it pits the great Russian
writers against the Russian intelligentsia. Think of it as Trotsky
vs. Tolstoy, Lenin vs. Dostoevsky, Bakunin vs. Chekhov. We Ameri-
cans have our own intelligentsia, which increasingly resembles the
classic Russian one, but we do not have anything like Russian litera-
ture with which to self-consciously oppose it. We need to enrich our

The Russell Kirk Memorial Lectures

This paper, in its entirety, can be found at http://report.heritage.org/hl1279
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LECTURE | NO. 1279
Delivered December 13, 2016
thinking if we are to avoid the Russian outcome a
century ago.
Russia has made two enormous contributions
to the modern world. Though never good at physi-
cal technology, it devised the world’s most influen-
tial political technology, which we have come to call
totalitarianism. In 1999, Time magazine proclaimed
Einstein the “man of the century”—the person who
“for better or worse most influenced the last 100
years”—but Einstein did not remotely affect so many
lives as Lenin. Russia’s other enormous contribution
was its literature.
Slavery Romantics
Russian appreciation of literature has no rival. I
can compare it only to the way the Hebrew Bible
must have seemed when books could still be added.
For Russians, the canon was and is sacred. Not only
did literature represent life, as Westerners presume,
but life existed to provide material for literature.
When Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was being serialized,
Dostoevsky enthused that at last the existence of the
Russian people had been justified. Can anyone imag-
ine a Frenchman supposing that the existence of the
French people required justification? And if it did,
that it could be justified by a novel?
When the writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was
half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he replied:
“My homeland is Russian literature.” In her recent
Nobel-prize acceptance speech, Svetlana Alexievich
echoed this comment by claiming three homelands:
her father’s Belarus, her mother’s Ukraine, and Rus-
sian literature. Like the poet Anna Akhmatova, she
thought of literature as a people’s equivalent of an
individual’s memory, without which a person or
a culture is demented. “Flaubert called himself a
human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When
I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and
exclamations, I always think—how many novels dis-
appear without a trace!” Like the great novelists,
Alexievich thought of life as the secret thoughts and
feelings of individual souls, which live in literature.
So here is where the argument is joined. Is life a
matter of grand politics or individual souls? And can
it be captured in a theory, or is there always what
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called a “sur-
plus” exceeding the grasp of any conceivable theory?
The intelligentsia believed in theories and crises,
the novelists in the complexities of ordinary, prosaic
experience. For the novelists, people were not just

abstractions or units to be sacrificed in the name of
a theory that promised perfection, and they thought
that the intelligentsia had far too much confidence—
much more than experience could warrant—that
their theories were correct and would have the
desired effect.
The intelligentsia was ready to
sacrifice or enslave individuals, who
did not really matter, to achieve utopia.
In short, the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice
or enslave individuals, who did not really matter, to
achieve utopia. Alexievich refers to such overconfi-
dent people as “slavery romantics, slaves of utopia.”
Alexievich quotes Varlam Shalamov, the Gulag’s
second most famous chronicler, who declared: “I was
a participant in a colossal battle, a battle that was
lost, for the genuine renewal of humanity.” Alexiev-
ich then continues:
[And] I reconstruct the history of that battle, its
victories and its defeats. The history of how people
wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth.
Paradise. The City of the Sun. In the end, all that
remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined
lives. There was a time, however, when no political
idea of the 20th century was comparable to com-
munism (or the October Revolution as its symbol),
a time when nothing attracted Western intellectu-
als and people all around the world more powerful-
ly and emotionally. Raymond Aron called the Rus-
sian Revolution the “opium of the intellectuals.”
Today that opium calls itself “social justice.” This
phrase has become a magic word, so that instead of
arguing for a specific change by assessing costs, ben-
efits, likeliness of success, and possibility of unin-
tended consequences, one just uses the term “social
justice.” One then treats all opponents as enemies
of justice, the way Marxists treated their opponents.
The possibility that people with other views may
believe in justice just as sincerely but have different
conceptions of what justice is—and the possibility
that even opponents who do share the same concep-
tion of justice may have different ideas on how best
to achieve it—such possibilities are not even imag-
ined or are dismissed out of hand.
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Alexievich insists we must not forget what
socialism, for all its aspirations, meant in practice
“because arguments about socialism have not died
down. A new generation has grown up with a differ-
ent picture of the world, but many young people are
reading Marx and Lenin again.” On American cam-
puses, there is no need to say “again.”
Why Tolstoy Did Not Belong to the
Intelligentsia
We get the word intelligentsia from Russian, where
it was coined about 1860. In its strict sense, the Rus-
sian word meant something very different from its
English counterpart. It was not synonymous with
intellectuals; well-educated people; or, least of all,
those who value independent thought. In any given
society, well-educated people might or might not
resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense. My
fear is that in America, they increasingly do.
To be an intelligent, a member of the intelligentsia,
one had to satisfy three criteria, which most educat-
ed people, including the great novelists, did not.
First of all, an intelligent had to share a set of radi-
cal beliefs. There was no such thing as a conservative
or moderate intelligent. Required beliefs varied from
generation to generation, but in the classic period
(roughly 1860 to 1905), they always included materi-
alism, atheism, some form of socialism or anarchism,
and revolutionism, by which was meant a belief in
revolution not as a means but as something valuable
in itself.
The terrorist Sergei Nechaev’s “Catechism of a
Revolutionary” explains that one is not a true revo-
lutionary “if he feels compassion for something in
this world.” “That is, the revolutionary must be will-
ing to destroy everything and kill anyone.” (Nechaev
did in fact commit as well as recommend murder.)
Note the language here: “catechism,” “this world.”
Revolutionism was a substitute religion (like envi-
ronmentalism today). Dostoevsky once observed
that Russians do not become atheists; they convert
to atheism. The prototypical intelligent was in fact
often the child of a priest or a former student in a
Russian Orthodox seminary, so calling someone
a “seminarian” was the equivalent of calling him a
Red. Ex-seminarians included the classic age’s most
influential figure, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, and,
later, Joseph Stalin. One reason, for example, that no
one would have considered Tolstoy an intelligent is
that he believed in God.

In her memoirs of life under Stalin, Hope Against
Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam observes:
[T]he decisive part in the subjugation of the intel-
ligentsia was played not by terror and bribery
(though, God knows, there was enough of both),
but by the word “Revolution,” which none of
them could bear to give up. It is a word to which
whole nations have succumbed, and its force was
such that one wonders why our rulers still need-
ed prisons and capital punishment.
Theorists may be entirely sincere in believing in
theory—and therefore in their own right to wield
absolute power—for the same reason that people
generally require little persuasion to accept the
moral goodness of their own desires.
Theorists may be entirely sincere in
believing in theory—and therefore
in their own right to wield absolute
power—for the same reason that
people generally require little
persuasion to accept the moral
goodness of their own desires.
Second, an intelligent had to identify primarily as
an intelligent. Leave everything, abandon father and
mother, and follow us. As Isaiah Berlin has explained:
To the old nineteenth-century intelligentsia
the very notion of a class of persons involved in
intellectual pursuits—such as professors, doc-
tors, engineers, experts, writers, who in other
respects live ordinary bourgeois lives and hold
conventional views, and who play golf or even
cricket—this notion would have been absolute-
ly horrifying.
To the intelligentsia, such a person would have
seemed “a traitor, a man who had sold out, a coward
or a ninny.”
If you thought of yourself as a nobleman, a doctor,
or a family man who just happened to be well-edu-
cated, you were not an intelligent. That is another rea-
son no one would have called Tolstoy, who used his
title of “Count,” an intelligent. Chekhov particularly
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hated this “artificial, overwrought solidarity,” as he
called it, because it entailed not thinking but repeat-
ing orthodoxies:
Yes, our young ladies and political beaux are pure
souls, but nine-tenths of their pure souls aren’t
worth a damn. All their inactive sanctity and
purity are based on hazy and naïve sympathies
and antipathies to individuals and labels, not to
facts. It’s easy to be pure when you hate the Devil
you don’t know and love the God you wouldn’t
have brains enough to doubt.
Sound familiar?
Third, an intelligent embraced a particular life-
style. In the 1860s and 1870s, this entailed a rigid
code of anti-manners prescribing behavior formerly
regarded as sordid. Chernyshevsky came by his low-
er-class manners honestly, but they became a model.
Aristocrats needed to acquire anti-refinement. Bad
taste, at least the proper bad taste, did not come eas-
ily. Women just had to smoke.
When Dostoevsky was looking to get remarried,
he had trouble finding a woman who was well-edu-
cated but not a radical. Once, to satisfy a deadline for
producing a novel, he in desperation hired a graduate
of Russia’s new stenography school in order to dic-
tate a novel as it occurred to him. At their first meet-
ing, he offered the stenographer a cigarette, but she
declined. Dostoevsky thought: If she doesn’t smoke,
perhaps she believes in God? In fact she did, and that
is how Dostoevsky met his second wife. Today, we
have our own, ever-changing virtue-signaling.
Little Napoleons
Behind these criteria lay a set of assumptions too
obvious to be articulated. One had to argue for one
or another theory, but not for theory—meaning theo-
ry of everything—itself. That was a given.
One reason Marxism proved so appealing was its
ambitious claim to resolve all contradictions. Think
of Marx’s assertion that “communism is the solution
of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solu-
tion.” No theory claiming much less could appeal to
Russians, or if it did, it was habitually transformed
into something all-explanatory—a habit that Dos-
toevsky called “the Russian aspect of their [Euro-
pean] doctrines”: “It consists of those inferences
from these doctrines which, in the form of unshake-
able axioms, are drawn only in Russia, whereas in

Europe, the possibility of such deductions is not
even suspected.” Or, as Dostoevsky remarked else-
where, a Russian intelligent is someone who can read
Darwin and promptly resolve to be a pickpocket.
In short, for Dostoevsky, Russians had a tendency
to take all ideas to the extreme; act on them in defi-
ance of basic decency or common sense; and, if they
wound up doing vile things, celebrate them as con-
tributing to the salvation of the people.
If theory rules, then theorists must rule. The
intelligents shared what Thomas Sowell has called
“the vision of the anointed.” This is the key criterion
without which a group cannot be an intelligentsia
in the Russian sense. Let every other intelligentsia
belief change, Dostoevsky insisted, but the belief in
themselves as saviors would remain.
Intellectuals are committed to belief
in theory for reasons that are anything
but disinterested.
Intellectuals are committed to belief in theory
for reasons that are anything but disinterested.
They are hardly likely to be drawn to the idea that
often enough we need not theory but practical intel-
ligence, which, after all, intellectuals have never
been celebrated for exhibiting. Theorists may be
entirely sincere in believing in theory—and there-
fore in their own right to wield absolute power—for
the same reason that people generally require little
persuasion to accept the moral goodness of their
own desires.
Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment, invokes several theories to justify mur-
dering an old pawnbroker. Strangely enough, they
contradict each other. First he invokes utilitarian-
ism. Just calculate, he thinks: On one side is an old
woman, sure to die soon anyway, whose life is worth
“no more than a cockroach”—less, in fact, since she
does positive harm. On the other side are hundreds
of lives that might be saved by her money. “One
death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple
arithmetic!” Not only is it moral to kill her; it would
be immoral not to.
But Raskolnikov also invokes radical relativism,
which, unlike utilitarianism, denies any foundation
for morality. Morality, he muses, is all “prejudice,
artificial terrors, and there are no barriers, and it’s
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Delivered December 13, 2016
all as it should be” because the world understood
naturalistically has only “is,” not “ought.”
Raskolnikov voices still more justifications,
but the one underlying them all is his Napoleonic
theory. The world is divided into two sorts of peo-
ple, the many ordinary and the few extraordinary.
Ordinary people are conservative. They uphold tra-
dition and the ancient law. They are people of the
present, “mere material that serves only to repro-
duce its kind.” Extraordinary people—like Lycur-
gus, Solon, and Napoleon—are men of the future
who bring a new word. They are necessarily crimi-
nals because the mere fact that they create a new
law makes them violators of the old. They have the
right, indeed the obligation, to do whatever their
idea requires. “I maintain that if the discoveries
of Kepler and Newton could not have been made
known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen,
a hundred or more men, Newton would have had
the right, would indeed have been duty bound…to
eliminate the dozen or hundred men.” The Bolshe-
viks also regarded murder as not just permitted but
morally required.
For Raskolnikov, “even men a little out of the
common” must be criminals in this way. This point
is crucial, because it allows for a group of special
people, not just one a century, like Napoleon: the
group called the intelligentsia. To appreciate how
long-lived is the idea of most people as mere mate-
rial, think of the frequent reference among Western
intellectuals to “the Soviet experiment,” a tacit jus-
tification of the Revolution even though it did not
turn out as hoped. One experiments on “mere mate-
rial,” not human beings like oneself.
A true social scientist, Raskolnikov maintains
that the exact number of extraordinary people is
governed by a natural law, which one could presum-
ably determine: “[T]here certainly is and must be a
definite law, it cannot be a matter of chance.” It can-
not be a matter of chance, because for the social sci-
entist nothing is, any more than there can be such
a thing as free will. If something is governed by law,
then everything is.
To these notions, Raskolnikov’s sister replies
with horror: “What is really original in all this…is
that you sanction bloodshed in the name of con-
science, and, excuse my saying so, with such fanati-
cism…that sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to
my mind more terrible than the official, legal sanc-
tion of bloodshed.” Why more terrible? Bloodshed is

bloodshed, isn’t it? Look ahead to The Gulag Archi-
pelago, where Solzhenitsyn asks why Macbeth killed
only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered
millions? The answer is that Shakespeare’s villains
“had no ideology”:
Ideology—that is what gives…the evildoer the
necessary steadfastness and determination.
That is the social theory which helps to make his
acts seem good instead of bad in his own and oth-
ers’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and
curses and will receive praises and honors.
If ideology applies everywhere, then, to quote
Nechaev, “everything that promotes the revolu-
tion is moral, everything that hinders it is immoral.”
Lenin and Trotsky maintained: It is not just that the
Party never makes mistakes; rather, whatever the
Party does is right because the Party does it. The
agent of History itself, the Party’s actions are moral
by definition.
If ideology applies everywhere, then,
to quote Nechaev, “everything that
promotes the revolution is moral,
everything that hinders it is immoral.”
It followed that compassion to class enemies must
be immoral. We teach children to overcome natu-
ral selfishness, but the Soviets taught them to over-
come natural compassion, which might stay their
hand from killing a class enemy. One valued not the
bourgeois notion of “human rights,” which includes
everyone, but class interest. As the novelist Vassily
Grossman explained, what race was to the Nazis,
class—the one you were born into—was to the Sovi-
ets. To refrain from torture, Trotsky declared, was
“the most pathetic and miserable liberal prejudice.”
In 1918, the founder of the Soviet secret police,
Felix Dzerzhinsky, published an article in the jour-
nal Red Terror—yes, that was really its title—in
which he instructed:
We are not waging war against individual per-
sons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as
a class. During the investigation, do not look for
evidence that the accused acted in deed or word
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Delivered December 13, 2016
against Soviet power. The first questions that you
ought to put are: To what class does he belong?
What is his origin? What is his education or pro-
fession? And it is these questions that ought to
determine the fate of the accused.
Like morality, truth is by definition what the
Party says it is. Georgy Pyatakov, who was twice
expelled from the Party and eventually shot, wrote
that a true Bolshevik is “ready to believe [not just
assert] that black is white and white is black, if the
Party required it.” In 1984, the character O’Brien
proclaims this very doctrine—two plus two is real-
ly five if the Party says it is—which he calls “collec-
tive solipsism.”
There are no limits: This is what the rule of the-
orists ultimately means. So let me lay my cards on
the table: To the extent that a group of intellectuals
comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to that extent
is totalitarianism on the horizon should that group
gain power. I anticipate the real possibility that in
the near future, we may live under a Putin-style
managed democracy, and not some sort of Swedish-
style social democracy, that could soon after morph
into a Stalinist state. Or rather, one beyond Stalin-
ism, since Stalin did not have access to today’s moni-
toring technology. That would make 1984 a libertar-
ian paradise.
There are no limits: This is what the
rule of theorists ultimately means. To
the extent that a group of intellectuals
comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to
that extent is totalitarianism on the
horizon should that group gain power.
Equality
Now for the pessimistic part of my paper. So far
as I know, the only 19th century thinker to fore-
see totalitarianism was Dostoevsky. The reason
he could, I think, is that he deeply understood the
mentality of the intelligentsia and what it would do
with power. Unlike Tolstoy, he had been a radical
intelligent and recognized what he himself might
have been willing to do. In one article, he refut-
ed the idea, common among conservatives, that
young radicals are simply “idle and undeveloped”

people, as one journal put it. On the contrary, Dos-
toevsky declares:
I am myself an old Nechaevist, I myself stood on
the scaffold condemned to death, and I assure
you that I stood in the company of educated peo-
ple…. And therein lies the real horror: that in Rus-
sia one can commit the foulest and most villain-
ous act without being in the least a villain.... The
possibility of considering oneself—and some-
times even being, in fact—an honorable person
while committing obvious and undeniable vil-
lainy—that is our whole affliction!
And, I might add, it is ours today.
The villain in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed,
Pyotr Stepanovich, who was modeled loosely on
Nechaev, outlines his plans, which come amazingly
close to what actually happened, either in Russia,
China, or Cambodia. He endorses the theories of one
Shigalyov, who famously declares: “I am perplexed
by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contra-
diction of the original idea with which I start. Start-
ing from unlimited freedom, I arrive at absolute
despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no
solution of the social problem but mine.”
It is thinking we recognize: Deny any limit on
individual, especially sexual, morality, and then
repress anyone who thinks differently. As in Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, “sex and [the drug] soma”
become life’s goal and so the substitute for all other
values. Far from being incompatible, freedom so
understood goes hand in hand with despotism.
Shigalyov demands “the division of mankind into
two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys unbounded
power over the other nine-tenths. The others have
to give up all individuality and become, so to speak,
a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a
series of regenerations attain primeval innocence….
They’ll have to work, however.” Another revolution-
ary objects that it would be better to take the nine-
tenths and “blow them up into the air instead of
putting them in paradise. I’d only leave a handful of
educated people who would live happily ever after-
wards on scientific principles.” At last, Pyotr Stepa-
novich endorses a proposal to cut off “a hundred mil-
lion heads.”
At the time, that sounded like sheer absurdi-
ty, but Stéphane Courtois’s anthology of experts,
The Black Book of Communism, estimates, rather
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Delivered December 13, 2016
conservatively, that very total for Communist kill-
ings worldwide. Is it any wonder Russian writers are
considered prophets?
Pyotr Stepanovich promises “a system of spying.
Every member of society spies on every other, and
it’s his duty to inform against them,” just as Stalin
was to require. The boy Pavel Morozov was made a
national hero for turning in his parents. (We already
have campuses where students are encouraged,
sometimes required, to turn each other in if they
hear expressions of “bias.” Honor codes may punish
the failure to do so.)
The new society’s key principle is absolute equali-
ty, which requires a complete suppression of individ-
uality or especially of great talent. “Cicero will have
his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put
out, Shakespeare will be stoned.” Did Pol Pot know
this novel?
The new society’s key principle is
absolute equality, which requires a
complete suppression of individuality
or especially of great talent.
Even before achieving power, the intelligentsia
offended great writers because it restricted art to
political propaganda, assuming art should exist
at all. “Boots are more important than Pushkin”
became a slogan. Art was suspect because it claimed
to reveal the human soul, but the very idea of the
soul was retrograde. Everyone knew the materialist
saying that “the brain secretes thought the way the
liver secretes bile.”
In the early 1860s, the physiologist Ivan Sece-
henov (Pavlov’s mentor, by the way) published his
influential book, Reflexes of the Brain, which out-
lines a neurological explanation of consciousness.
Dmitri Karamazov paraphrases the theory: What
people used to call “the soul” is really so many
neurons with their tails quivering. With the small-
est change in wording, that theory is of course
prevalent today. “But I’m sorry to lose God,” Dmi-
tri concludes.
The Pursuit of Happiness
The Russian novel is known, above all, for psy-
chology. What is less often appreciated is that in

showing the complexity of the psyche, the novelists
were making a polemical point. The intelligentsia
denied that people were complex at all. Human com-
plexity was an idea hindering radical action.
Like Jeremy Bentham and mainstream econo-
mists today, Chernyshevsky insisted in What Is to
Be Done?, the utopian novel that became the intel-
ligentsia’s bible, that everyone always does and
should act to achieve their greatest advantage. Dos-
toevsky’s Notes from Underground parodies Cherny-
shevsky’s book by renarrating its incidents as they
might actually happen to people with real psychol-
ogy. The underground man appeals to empiricism,
which presumably a scientist should respect: No one
actually observing human behavior could presume
it is simple or rational. What is more, people, unlike
molecules, can know the laws that supposedly gov-
ern their behavior and act to thwart them, a possi-
bility that forever rules out a Newtonian account of
human beings. What a person values most of all is
that his actions should be his own, that he is not just
a piano key or an organ stop played upon by imper-
sonal laws, that his choices could have differed and
therefore matter.
Rather than give up that sense of self, the under-
ground man insists, people will act spitefully, mean-
ing against their self-interest, just to prove that they
are not piano keys or organ stops. If a rationalist
utopia could ever be achieved, if everything were
provided for one without effort, and if the laws of
nature and society could show the future in advance,
then life would become pointless. As Dostoevsky
observes in one of his sketches:
People would see that they had no more life left,
that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no
personality…. People would realize that there
is no happiness in inactivity…that it is not pos-
sible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing
something to him of one’s labor…and that happi-
ness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to
achieve it.
“A Surplus of Humanness”
All the great realists, not just Russians, were
master psychologists. From Jane Austen to Henry
James, the genre of the realist novel depicts people
as individuals who cannot be reduced to abstract
categories. I begin where all categories, social or
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Delivered December 13, 2016
even psychological, that could account for me end.
Bakhtin, who argued that genres embody implicit
philosophical assumptions, concluded that realist
novels presuppose the irreducibility of individuals to
abstractions. People have “a surplus of humanness”:
An individual cannot be completely incarnated
into the flesh of existing sociohistorical catego-
ries. There is no mere form that would be able to
incarnate once and forever all his human pos-
sibilities…no form that he could fill to the very
brim and yet at the same time not splash over the
brim. There always remains an unrealized sur-
plus of humanness.
The difference between Russian and Europe-
an novels is that Russian novels so often make this
assumption explicit. Russians typically regard nov-
els as another, and superior, form of philosophy.
Westerners more often regard novelists as illustrat-
ing truths learned from some philosopher or social
scientist, and so Proust is read as applied Bergson,
Sterne as enlivened Locke, and Jane Austen as illus-
trated Thomas Reid. But all one has to do is compare
the philosopher’s psychological theory with a great
novelistic heroine like Dorothea Brooke in Middle-
march, and it is plain that George Eliot must have
known something no philosopher ever did. Other-
wise, philosophers would have produced portraits
as believable as Dorothea Brooke, but none has ever
come close.
Russians view their novelists not as
illustrators but as discoverers, with
the philosophers hurrying after to
provide what Bakhtin calls a partial
but always inadequate “transcription”
of novelistic wisdom.
When this failure becomes obvious, Westerners
typically resort to the idea Freud uses in his essay
on Dostoevsky. With condescending indulgence to a
brilliant if sloppy mind, he presented the author of
The Brothers Karamazov as grasping merely intui-
tively deep truths that only superior thinkers, like
Freud himself, could articulate explicitly. But this is
even more absurd. Dostoevsky’s characters, not just

the underground man but even the brawling Dmitri
Karamazov, deliver long speeches about the mind,
so one could more readily fault Dostoevsky for too
much explicit articulation.
For Bakhtin, that is the proper role of the critic,
which is one reason so many Russian philosophers,
including Bakhtin himself, presented their ideas as
explications of great writers. Bakhtin understood
that the ideas he transcribed from Dostoevsky con-
tinued his argument with intelligentsia ideologues,
now represented by the Bolshevik regime.
Jones
So here is one lesson of Russian literature: There
can never be a social science if by that term we mean
a discipline modeled on the hard sciences. The Rus-
sian writers were reviving a tradition in eclipse
since the 17th century, when the idea took hold that
any respectable discipline must resemble Euclid-
ian geometry or, after Newton, physics. For the
great rationalists and their heirs, real knowledge
was theoretical, ideally mathematical, and all spe-
cific events were the mere consequence of the laws
theory discovers. To the extent you need a narrative
rather than laws to explain things, to that extent
you fall short of scientific status. Real sciences don’t
tell stories.
By the 19th century, this “moral Newtonian-
ism,” as Élie Halévy called it, became a mania, and
not just with Marxists and social Darwinists. Before
Auguste Comte coined the term “sociology,” he
planned to call his new discipline “social physics,”
and Léon Walras, a founder of modern economics,
based his idea of equilibrium on the stability of the
solar system. He even sought the endorsement of the
day’s greatest mathematician, Henri Poincaré. Even
Freud found himself adopting hydraulic metaphors
of the mind and claiming not just that some acts of
forgetting are intentional but that all are: since what
sort of natural law admits of exceptions?
But there is another tradition of thought, extend-
ing from Aristotle to Montaigne, Clausewitz, and
Tolstoy, which holds that reality demands two types
of reasoning. In addition to theoretical reasoning
(Aristotle’s episteme), we need practical reasoning
(phronesis).
Like geometry, theory offers truths that are uni-
versal, precise, without exception, and timeless.
One reasons from the theory down to the specific
examples it subsumes. For the alternative tradition,
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some questions demand reasoning up from partic-
ular cases. Aristotle cites clinical disciplines, like
medicine. One does not want a physician whose only
interest in one’s illness is its potential contribution
to science. No good doctor is just an applied biologist.
He uses everything he knows, theory and untheo-
rized experience, to devise a treatment for this
patient at this moment. Timeliness matters—except
in the Department of Veterans Affairs—as it doesn’t
in geometry.
The same holds for ethical issues. If one reasons
down from general rules, one will often wind up
with monstrous answers, Aristotle notes, because
rules are formulated with a paradigm case in mind,
but real situations may differ in significant ways
that cannot be foreseen. Then one must use judg-
ment, which, by definition, cannot be formalized.
Good judgment grows out of experience, mistakes,
and reflection upon mistakes, a process yielding not
theoretical knowledge but practical wisdom. That
is why, as Aristotle observes, young men can be
good mathematicians but not good ethicists, which
requires long experience.
Practical wisdom yields answers that are true, as
Aristotle liked to say, “on the whole and for the most
part.” Now, anyone who described the Pythagorean
theorem as true “on the whole and for the most part”
would demonstrate he did not grasp what mathe-
matical reasoning is, but anyone who sought quasi-
mathematical solutions to ethical problems would
be just as wrongheaded. Marx’s enemy, the Russian
socialist Alexander Herzen, argued that there are no
definitive solutions to social problems, that history
has no aim, and that “there is no libretto…. In history
all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore.” The
answers given by practical reasoning are always ten-
tative, open to revision depending on circumstanc-
es. That is why one never gives all power to anyone
committed to a single answer, but allows for critics
to point out failures—if not at Yale then at least at the
University of Chicago.
In ethics, reasoning up from cases is called casu-
istry, and the fact that the term is now pejorative
suggests how thoroughly the theoretical view tri-
umphed. Casuists use rules in the sense of rules-
of-thumb, which serve as mere reminders of par-
ticular sorts of cases—the beginning, not the end,
of an argument. When the theoretical tradition tri-
umphed, casuistry was banished from philosophy
but found a home in the novel. Daniel Defoe began

his career writing casuistical advice columns, and
the cases he invented gradually grew in length to
become novels like Moll Flanders. As a genre, the
realist novel is casuistical: It teaches how to derive
wisdom from careful consideration of particular,
richly described cases.
Philosophers still present ethical problems by
briefly sketching a dilemma that occurs to “Jones,”
who is given no biography, lives in no society, and
chooses at no particular time. Contrast that with
the dilemmas facing Anna Karenina or Dorothea
Brooke. Take this as a novelistic dictum: No one is
ever Jones.
Again, the difference between the Russians and
other realist novelists is that the Russians, especial-
ly Tolstoy, make the genre’s casuistical assumptions
explicit. At the end of Anna Karenina, Levin learns
to make wise ethical choices not by applying rules
but by acquiring wisdom from particular cases sen-
sitively observed. Bakhtin’s early treatises on ethics
also explore the ethical limitations of what he calls
“theoretism.”
A Good Night’s Sleep
Tolstoy’s heroes begin believing in theory but
learn its limitations. In War and Peace, Prince
Andrei at first admires the German generals who
have purportedly discovered a hard science of war-
fare, which in this novel stands for any conceivable
social science.
Before the battle of Austerlitz, the generals claim
that it is a mathematical certainty that Napoleon
will be defeated and that “every contingency has
been foreseen.” But whenever the generals lose, as
they do so spectacularly at Austerlitz, they explain
that their instructions were not precisely carried
out, which in battle is always the case. They behave
just like economists today, who, when predictions
fail, say either that their recommendations were
applied too cautiously or that even though they
were proven wrong, they have adjusted their theo-
ry so that it now accounts for what happened. Like
Paul Krugman, they are never wrong. Of course,
even astrologers can adjust a theory to predict what
already happened.
Prince Andrei learns that a science of human
affairs is impossible. He asks: “What science can
there be in a matter, as in every practical matter,
nothing can be determined and everything depends
on innumerable conditions, the significance of
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LECTURE | NO. 1279
Delivered December 13, 2016
which becomes manifest at a particular moment,
and no one can tell when that moment will come?”
We face “a hundred million chances, which will
be determined on the instant by whether we run
or they run, whether this man or that man will be
killed.” Irreducible chance matters—no one can tell
whether a bullet will hit a brave man or a coward
capable of infecting others—and timeliness mat-
ters: Things are decided “on the instant,” an instant
that is not just the automatic derivative of earlier
instants. And what is true of battle is true “in every
practical matter.”
Tolstoy’s wise general, Kutuzov, who falls asleep
in the council of war before Austerlitz, at last calls
a halt to the discussion: “Gentlemen, the disposi-
tion for tomorrow cannot be changed. And the most
important thing before a battle is—a good night’s
sleep.” Why a good night’s sleep? Because in a world
of radical contingency, where unforeseeable situa-
tions arise and opportunities must be seized instant-
ly or lost, what matters is not theoretical knowledge
but alertness.
Prosaics and Indoor Socialism
What Andrei fails to learn, but his friend Pierre
does, is the insight for which three decades ago I
coined the term “prosaics”—an insight central to
numerous writers, most obviously Tolstoy and Chek-
hov. Radicals and romantics picture life in terms of
dramatic events. The ordinary incidents between
crises are viewed as trivial or despised as bourgeois.
Tolstoy and Chekhov believed the opposite: Life is
lived at ordinary moments, and what is most real is
what is barely noticeable, like the tiniest movements
of consciousness.
Tolstoy explains with an anecdote: The painter
Bryullov once corrected a student’s sketch. “Why
you only touched a tiny bit,” the student remarked,
“but it is quite a different thing.” Bryullov replied: “Art
begins where that tiny bit begins.” Tolstoy concludes:
That saying is strikingly true not only of art but
of all of life. One may say that true life begins
where the tiny bit begins—where what seem to
us minute and infinitely small alterations take
place. True life is not lived where great external
changes take place—where people move about,
clash, fight, and slay one another. It is lived only
where these tiny, tiny infinitesimally small
changes occur.

Tolstoy’s novels describe the infinitesimal move-
ments of consciousness, our smallest choices, and
the mistakes we instantaneously forget but which
the novel records: and that is one reason his novels
are so long. In our brief lives, every instant matters.
The Russian novel is so long because life is so short.
Tolstoy’s wisest heroes learn to see the richness
right in front of them hidden in plain view. Learn-
ing this truth, Pierre comes to resemble “a man who,
after straining his eyes to peer into the remote dis-
tance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet….”
In everything near and comprehensible he had
seen only what was limited, petty, and meaning-
less...[but] now...he discarded the [mental] tele-
scope through which he had been gazing over
the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the ever-
changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and
infinite life around him.
In Chekhov, ignoring the ordinary experiences
is what wastes lives, and such waste is his constant
theme. In Uncle Vanya, one character observes:
“[T]he world is being destroyed not by crime and
fire, but by all these petty squabbles.” Shockingly,
Chekhov praised what no intellectual is supposed
to respect: bourgeois virtues like cleanliness, ordi-
nary decency, and paying one’s debts.
In this spirit, Svetlana Aleksievich’s books
orchestrate the voices of countless ordinary people
responding microscopically to events historians
treat macroscopically. She seeks to capture what
she describes as the “history of ‘domestic,’ ‘indoor’
socialism…. The history of how it played out in the
human soul. I am drawn to that small space called
a human being…a single individual. In reality, that
is where everything happens.” She is keenly aware
of her debt to the great novelists and their dislike of
grand theoretical systems.
It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit
into…one mind, that truth is splintered. There is
a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the
world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows
much, much more about itself than it has record-
ed in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the
everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words….
The everyday life of the soul, the things that the
big picture of history usually omits, or disdains.
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LECTURE | NO. 1279
Delivered December 13, 2016
These novelistic insights—the existence of sheer
contingency, true life as lived in “the tiny bit,” the
openness of time, meaning that what we choose really
matters—and the importance of the individual soul:
All these insights are closely linked. The ideologues,
who look down on ordinary people as boors and red-
necks and who put their faith in the abstractions they
alone master, will never understand them. They see
the world, if viewed through the right lens, as ulti-
mately simple, unlike Tolstoy’s Pierre, who comes
to appreciate “the endless variety of men’s minds,
which prevents a truth from ever appearing exactly
the same to any two persons.” By the novel’s end, “the
legitimate individuality of each person’s views…now

became the basis of the sympathy Pierre felt for other
people and the interest that he took in them.”
Conclusion
My conclusion is brief: We face a choice between
the dangerous theory-based uniformity of the intel-
ligentsia and the wise perspective on life espoused
by Russian literature.
Pray for Chekhov.
—Gary Saul Morson, PhD, is Lawrence B. Dumas
Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern
University and is the author of Anna Karenina in Our
Time: Seeing More Wisely (Yale University Press,
2007).
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